If Matthew is to be believed, Jerusalem wasn’t just a city full of people hearing about a resurrection, it was a city full of people who actually saw the resurrected David, Joshua, Samuel, Isaiah, and other Jewish saints strolling through the streets when Jesus was crucified.
As Thomas Paine said, if there were any truth to it, there would not have been an unconverted Jew left in Jerusalem.
I answered this question in the OP. I started the thread in response to an invitation from another poster who said he could prove it.
You’re also wrong about educated people not appreciating the lack of proof. There are some very educated people who make their livings trying to argue that the resurrection is provable.
There was a city, and it fell to war. That doesn’t make the Trojan War real. Finding Wilusa doesn’t suddenly validate discordant apples and giant wooden horses.
The interpretation I’ve always heard made it a much lower-key event than that- it was only a few who were raised & they were seen by a few, such as their loved ones. The JWs actually interpret it that the earthquake broke open tombs so that the bodies came out & were seen by people entering Jerusalem.
I realize that you are only reporting what the JWs say, but that interpretation is pure bullshit. The passage very clearly contradicts it. Matthew 27 (NIV):
“52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”
You can read it in various other translations here.
They all make it clear that
a) MANY people came to life and walked into the city, and
b) they were witnessed by MANY people
The only possible quibble is exactly which people were resurrected, but if God is going to perform a miracle like that, it wouldn’t make much sense to use the B list prophets.
It is clearly the greatest miracle in the Bible since the Creation, and had to be widely known if true, and yet nobody bothered to report it but Matthew. Not even the other Gospel writers would touch it.
Untrue. Most of the translations state that the saints were merely asleep. So in fact they weren’t dead at all — I conjecture that they drank too much at a kind of slumber party and thus overslept, requiring the infinite decibels of an omnimax alarm clock.
This was in the days before one could set his smartphone to wake him up with smooth jazz or something, even when the power’s out.
True, indeed, but it is hard to find many Christians willing to defend the truthfulness of the march of the holy zombies; so I usually don’t even bring it up.
Bodies? After 1,000 years? I didn’t realize that we knew how to mummify people.
Not to mention that supposedly they arose, and went into the city to be seen by many. Good trick for a collection of bones.
Anyhow, maybe the JWs interpret it that way because that is what the Bible says.
There are suggestions in the Gospels that he may have dabbled in Catholicism.
If I got whooshed, my bad. When it comes to literalist apologetics, I’ve learned not to assume any interpretation of the language, however off the wall, is proffered in anything but dead earnest (not that I thought you actually believed the above, but I thought you might have been offering up a fundy rebuttal you’d heard somewhere).
OK, I checked the Interlinear Greek & technically, it just says the bodies “were raised”- “to life” was added by the NIV translators. I do happen to think that is the correct interpretation, not the JW one, but the distinction does exist in the Greek.
As to “many” being raised & seen by “many”- yep, no denying that is in the text. But how many is “many”? L How many saints & how many witnesses?
Would a couple dozen saints count as ‘many’? Seventh-Day Adventist teachings have suggested they may be the “twenty-four elders” of Revelation 4-5.
Would a few hundred witnesses count as ‘many’? Paul in I Corinthians 15 claims that 500 had seen the raised Jesus.
Not saying that these definitions of ‘many’ are accurate but I think they’re worth considering.
Just my opinion, but I would say that dead people walking into Jerusalem is just as remarkable as resurrected people walking into Jerusalem, so I don’t see what is gained by the distinction.
